Medicine: Adding Life to Years

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Modern medicine has reversed the thinking of millenniums on the aging process and the aged. It holds that while aging is inevitable, many of the distressing changes so often seen with it can be palliated, minimized or actually averted. For this reason, Dr. Frederic Zeman, head physician at Manhattan's Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews, insists on a semantic distinction, doggedly calls these changes "diseases in old age," not "of old age."

Threefold Increase. Along with the development of biochemistry, medicine has sparked the speedup of a new science, gerontology. Properly the study of aging in all living things, and involving social as well as medical sciences, it has focused most sharply on the aging human since 1903, when Elie Metchnikoff suggested in The Nature of Man that "this science may be called gerontology" (from the Greek geron, an old man). In 1909 Internist Ignatz L. Nascher coined the word geriatrics (from geras, old age, and iatreia, cure) for the medical care of the old. Geriatrics has grown as a sub-specialty of internal medicine, but is not yet recognized as a fully distinct specialty—and many geriatricians think it never should be.

U.S. census figures provide wholesale proof of a mushrooming demand for knowledge in gerontology and for the services of geriatricians. In 1900 the life expectancy of a U.S. male at birth was 49 years, and there were only 374,000 Americans aged 80 and over—one in 200 population. Now it is estimated that there are nearly 2,300,000, or almost three in 200 population; nearly 1,300,000 are women, slightly fewer than 1,000,000 are men. Projecting present trends in death rates, the National Office of Vital Statistics predicts that by 1980 there will be 4,600,000 octogenarians, and by the year 2,000, about 7,400,000.

Though today's newborn U.S. baby (averaging the rates for white males and females) has a life expectancy of 70 years —a 43% increase since 1900—the remaining life expectancy of those who have already reached 70 has increased but little in the same period—from 9.3 to 11.2 years. This is because most of the life-saving achievements in medicine and public health have been concentrated in the younger age brackets, from the first few weeks of life through adolescence. The middle-aged have benefited mainly from the decline in deaths from tuberculosis and pneumonia.

The Spartan Stuff. To prepare for the oldsters whose sheer numbers will revolutionize not only the practice of medicine but also the world's social, political and economic structure, gerontologists turn both to their test tubes and to individuals like Amos Alonzo Stagg. From him and the men on nearby rungs of time's ladder they hope to learn what are the common denominators in longevity—and, more especially, in useful longevity. For they subscribe to the motto: "Not just to add years to life, but to add life to years."

Nonagenarian Stagg's life, though far from typical, may contain clues, for the observant gerontologist, to the secret of a long and useful existence. The first factor in Stagg's favor—though not to the same degree as in the case of some of his near peers—is heredity. Stagg's father, a cobbler who lived in West Orange, N.J., lived to be 73, his mother 79.